1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system and method for distributed processing real-time systems of general purpose or special purpose computers for replacing the underlying connection-based communication systems at run-time, including communication between multiple computer programs executing on multiple computers.
2. Description of Related Art
Distributed processing systems of general or special purpose computers perform their problem solving tasks by partitioning the computations to be performed into software programs that perform discrete defined processing. Typically, these software programs execute on one or more processors. Multiple programs may reside on one processor, depending on the computation resources available and the size of the task to be performed.
The configuration and deployment of programs to processors in such a distributed processing architecture is required to be determined at run-time, not in advance, to accommodate changes in processing resource availability due to equipment failures, software failures, and resources being used by other programs.
These programs communicate inputs, outputs, and intermediate processing results as part of the collaboration required to perform the task at hand.
This communication occurs between processors on some “communication fabric.” Communication fabric refers to some set of dedicated, switched, or demand access based set of electrical, physical, and logical interfaces providing the actual transfer of coded information between processors, including single point-to-point topologies, as well as larger topologies.
Communication between processors is performed using software interfaces that hide the details of implementation of the communication mechanisms. For streaming data, such as signals measured from transducers or other sensors, or for large amounts of data to be processed and communicated in real-time, a connection-based communication protocol, or a stateless communication protocol emulating a connection-based protocol, is used.
Heretofore, the underlying communication mechanism for streaming data or large volume real-time data was 1) the same as the communication mechanism used for the configuration and deployment of the programs; 2) determined in advance, at design-, code-, compile-, or link-time, possibly selected from a set of available mechanisms, based on some desired performance characteristic.
The lack of a mechanism to select the communication mechanism at run-time, not in advance, independent of the communication mechanism used for the configuration and deployment of the programs, prohibits the accommodation of changes in communication resource availability due to link, equipment or software failures, or communication bandwidth resources being used by other collaborating programs.
Furthermore, the lack of a mechanism to select the communication mechanism at run-time, independent of the communication mechanism used for the configuration and deployment of the programs, denies the system designer and integrator the ability to select the communication mechanism based on cost-performance for the particular program development, streaming/high-volume interface requirement, and communication mechanism availability.
Based on the above considerations, it is desirable to replace existing processor communication mechanisms in the operation of a distributed processing architecture framework for real-time and near real-time streaming data processing. The present invention provides the ability to change the underlying mechanism at run-time, solving the problem of how to handle changes in the processing and communication equipment when employing a distributed processing system.